You will meet Rume on an icy world, dotted with hardy villages clinging to the sides of skyscraping mountains heavy with snow.
It will be a cold, quiet place, filled with unassuming beauty that reflects your state of mind, painting it. Impressions: rolling alpine meadows dotted with tiny sugared wildflowers; the long, lonely call of great shaggy mammals; ice-cold streams trickling over smooth stones, an infinity of tiny pools and gullies. You'll need this calm, after dozens of worlds and thousands of memories swirling through your head. You'll need time to reflect and be alone, an exile from your gift, from loves lost, risks taken, shames and triumphs and the inevitable tragedy of living. You'll stay a while, six months, perhaps, and reflect. This is what you will think as you paint. But you will be wrong.
A warm bedroll and a few scant provisions are all you'll bring on your first expedition from a nameless village into the alpine wild, under the crisp brilliant light of late spring at altitude. Snow falls no longer, but the air is thin, and nights still bitterly cold. You'll spend a week exploring, letting the quiet and stillness of the place permeate your soul, take root there.
And then, one morning, you will crest a rise and see a figure, standing on the edge of a cliff ringed by high snow-capped peaks and glacier-filled valleys. Your heart will stop for a moment, having thought yourself utterly alone.
The figure will turn to you. And after long quiet moments, raise a hand in greeting.
On that high meadow under the glaciers, strangely graceful hands will pull back a fur-lined parka, revealing features that will strike you almost physically. You'll have loved before by then, but not for a long time, long enough to wonder if you'll ever feel that way again. From the moment you first see that face, you will know or hope it will be one you can love and be loved by, fiercely and no matter how briefly.
At the time, you will find difficulty even speaking, blaming your stumbling words on the knife-ice air spilling into your lungs. Rume will see right through you.
You'll begin to talk, in trickles then torrents, there on the cliff and later back at your ramshackle camp. Rume is a product of this icy world, but the cold and wind have sculpted a soul that is at once more alive and more vibrant than almost any that intersects your strange and lonely life. Both your lifetimes have been spent wandering: for Rume, seemingly halfway around this frosty globe, aching always to discover more, and thrilling in the telling, the sharing with others. The words of this stranger enthrall you, like a poet, a storyteller, and you listen enraptured. But above and underneath the flow of language something more profound osmoses. A connection will begin to form between you and this curious, sometimes quiet, intensely poetic and clever soul, and you'll wonder if perhaps the Call does not just join lone wayfarers, but makes all connections, shapes all meetings and partings under its great wing till none at all remain to happen by chance.
Over the next few days, exploring together, a thousand observations will pass through your mind like snowflakes, on the verge of melting together into something beautiful. The way long, almost plodding lines of argument will suddenly culminate in a stunning, acute, insightful observation, leaving your mind whirling breathlessly. The laughter which flows so freely you first take it for a nervous tic, before realizing it springs from a genuine delight and astonishment at the brimful world. The giddying flush of growing attraction, stoked with the glorious knowledge of its return, cared for and amplified.
When you first make love to Rume, it will be surrounded by that high mountain air, unspoiled frost crystallizing on the outside of your blankets, the steam from your breaths and bodies spilling out past your heads and spiraling upward towards the stars, merged in one shapeless cloud of heat.
One of many things you'll discover Rume to be is a healer. A life spent wandering through the mountains leads to knowledge: which plants are good and which are bad, among a myriad of other things. And this world is not entirely wild: there are distant towns with arched bridges and cobblestone streets, where years before Rume studied with bespectacled professors in dusty halls. In the quaint backwards towns you move through, outposts on the edges of your treasured arctic wilderness, sprinkled with illiterate shopkeepers in deerskin suits and merchant families marveling over lace doilies, such stories are hard to believe.
But it's in such a town that you and Rume will meet the trapper, coughing at a chilly bar with dark circles beginning to form under his eyes.
"You folks ain't travelin' preachers, by chance?" he'll ask, eying your traveling garb as the two of you step inside, a quick supply stop on a longer journey. "They ain't got preachers or doctors in this heatforsaken town, and I 'spect I'll need one or t'other before long."
Rume will sit and talk with him while you barter for supplies, but by the time you return you'll sense the journey has been postponed.
"Mountain sickness," Rume will say to you sadly, resting a hand on your shoulder, and "It will be a few days. He needs my help."
Perhaps that's really the moment you'll fall in love, as you see the care with which those delicate hands minister over this stranger, the way Rume's face pinches in concern and care simply because someone is in need. Perhaps what you'll love about Rume is something you fear dead in yourself, something lost between worlds on your long, rootless sojourn.
And so for a time you'll stay in that cramped room above the store next to the trapper's, and listen to his stories between fits of coughing and endless batches of Rume's teas and poultices. The old man's travels, while not farther than Rume's, run deeper: up endlessly rising snow-swept valleys and over high icy passes before which all but the bravest and craziest turn back, in pursuit of the great brown creatures whose shaggy fur is so coveted by graceful ladies in distant towns. Staring at his kit stacked against the room's pine boards, handmade snowshoes and thick fur parka and battered tin tinderbox, you'll feel a strange affinity for this grizzled explorer, whose tools for moving on are so much more practical and simple than your own. In these thoughts you will not be alone: one windy night he'll grip your hand and mutter with fierce conviction, "ain't we a set, us three, eh? Ain't we just a matchin' set."
Later, in the scratchy straw bed next door, you'll hold Rume tight as the frigid wind gusts through the cracks and knotholes in the wall. Rume will squeeze your shoulder, and quietly ask if you're thinking of moving on.
You won't need to think. No, you'll say. The two of you will stay, until his time.
And Rume will hold you tighter.
The old trapper's time will come too soon. Despite all Rume's effort, his cough will worsen, and his face will sink more and more, already waxy skin becoming thin and pale. On his last night, you and Rume will sit up with him as he rants his way in and out of delirium, until a spell of calmness settles.
"There's a place up in the mountains near here," he'll say, after a long stretch of silence, "in a hidden little valley. The Tumble, it's called. A little lodge. Empty now." He looks at Rume, breathing shallowly, then at you. "It would be a good place to settle down," he says, "settle in. For the winter. If you're looking. I'll tell you... tell you the way..." Rume will put a warm hand on his rapidly chilling one, until he drifts off to sleep again, then move it to your arm and rest it there, briefly. A simple thing, but that touch will be so heavy with possibility and promise and temptation and potential that you'll have to step outside (settle down), take a walk in the breathless twilight of the arctic fall, try to stop your head (settle in) from spinning and see (if you're looking) what's inside it.
You'll walk for some time, leaving the hazy glow of the village lamplight far behind.
How many worlds have you moved through, wayfarer?
Will you ever stop moving?
A sudden commotion will snap you back to the present. A crash ahead; an animal snarl. Cautiously, you'll step forward into a clearing.
One of the yellow-tan wolf-creatures, feasting on a fresh kill: a shambling grey moose. The wolf will snarl at you as you step into the clearing, but spook and dart into the snow-covered pines, leaving you alone with the dying creature.
You'll watch it take its last few breaths, and then something will tingle in your fingertips. The long bristles of the creature's tail. Plastic ovals. Your eyes will flick around the clearing in sudden realization. The creature's hide, dried and stretched. The bright yellow stamen of the meadow wildflowers, crushed into a fluorescent paste. The crumbly red layers in the mossy hillsides that stain bedrolls crimson. Yes; everything you need is here. Of course.
You'll realize or remember that nothing in your life is made to last. The trapper's lodge in the mountains, Rume, the whispers of a life you could make together are as impermanent and deceptive as sculptures in ice. Your fate is to always move, always travel. To wayfare, alone.
And you'll cry, there in sight of the brown beast's blank dead eyes as its lifeblood oozes into the snow, cry for the first time in memory, tears freezing on your cheeks, snow melting into the knees of your warm traveling clothes. You'll cry for everything you've lost, everything you've given up, abandoned, left behind forever.
But also you will wonder.
Must you go?
Could you stay?
Relentless, blood seeps forward through the clean white snow, leaving bitter crimson slush behind.